Dell Poweredge 2950 Raid Battery

ok that was odd, in my IE it showed there were no answers lol.

Disregard my pre-edited post :)

Occasionally questions slip through the cracks, which was undoubtedly the case here, as it is a simple question (changing the battery does not affect the RAID config).  Usually if they aren't answered in the first several hours, they don't get an answer, as they risk not being seen when we log in to "catch up" on questions.  Also keep in mind that Dell has not always had people manning these forums - it has traditionally been a users-helping-users forum.  Some of the Dell employees (like Manfred), when they recently started posting here, searched threads in the forums and answered them, some not realizing that they were so old (hence an answer to a 10-month old question).

Oh! I was replying gaberth's post which dated Tue, Feb 28 2012 2:03AM.

Sorry Manfred ... a 5-week-old question, I stand corrected.  I hate the way it shows previous "pages" of the thread clear at the bottom (as I understand it, it will be addressed in the next upgrade of the forum).

:)

To add to this old question....

As to cached data which the battery is in place to protect.... the battery protects data which is on the raid adapter but was not committed to the disks if the server has an abrupt power shutdown such as a tripped breaker, pull plug, power outage. If the server is shutdown gracefully, as in start>shutdown, then the data is written to disk  before the server powers off, and the battery backed cache does not come into play.

Last time I had a similar issue and updating the controller firmware fixed it.

I would try to update before spending the money and time changing the battery on it

I did 2 years ago and the system is still running with the original battery so the error was a false positive

Has anyone here actually successfully replaced one of these batteries? I've tried putting new ones in a few servers but the error remains. The server is fully patched up with drivers and firmwares, so not sure why they don't work.

As I've mentioned in these forums before, we have many 2950 servers, most of which are now reporting this error. I've replaced many of the batteries at great cost and none of them have worked. Is there a way for the front panel to stop reporting the error even though it persists?

No, you can't disable the message.

I bought a new battery from Dell about 6 months ago, replaced it and the error went away.

Last time I had this issue Dell support had me update the BIOS and that worked too